We close the year 2024 with the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, a murderer and torturer of his own people, whose family has been in power for nearly 60 years.
We also close the year with the democratic defeat of Ghana’s ruling party in free and fair elections because the incumbents failed to address people’s grievances over the cost of living.
We gallop towards 2025 with a new flu-like disease threatening to ravage the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We wait to enter the new year with US president-elect Donald Trump threatening a new trade war, threatening the Brics nations and their de-dollarisation efforts and threatening vengeance on his political rivals.
We stand at the gates of 2025 with the Middle East in flames, with Russia still on a war footing and with most of Europe in the hands of rightwingers who want to shut their borders to the rest of the world.
We step into the new year with election violence in Mozambique, with those who staged coups across West Africa still in power, yet with an inspiring new democratically elected young leadership in Botswana.
The first six months of the GNU have been full of sound and fury, but it all signifies nothing if we don’t grow an economy out of it
In South Africa, we greet 2025 with a government of national unity that many are hopeful about, and yet we realise with dread that those who lead it have no clear economic turnaround plan and have not fully embraced the fact that “coalition” is formed from the Latin verb “coalescere (fusion, coming together), instead of constant bickering with your partner.
We welcome the new year in with the EFF of Julius Malema looking dazed and confused after a lacklustre election campaign, having undergone a heavy loss of leaders, including its deputy president, and being led by a man who suffers from a debilitating logorrhoea when he sees a microphone.
And we still have two weeks of 2024.
We have lived through an extraordinary four years. The Covid pandemic brought with it numerous political, social and economic pathologies that have upended nations, brought about geopolitical shifts and redrawn alliances and coalitions across the globe. What this month and this year tell us is that we are not about to escape the bucking horse.
I hate the word, but “disruption”, when you peel back the fluff that influencers and motivational speakers have imbued it with, is exactly what we have experienced these past four years. Uncertainty and instability are the long tail of what the world and our country have experienced in this disruptive period. We may not be at the beginning of the disruption, but we are certainly not at the tail end of it either. The year 2025 will be full of it.
On the domestic front, I am quite keen to see whether President Cyril Ramaphosa and DA federal council chair Helen Zille can stop playing to the gallery, whip their parties into line, buck up and get to the actual work of ensuring that the coalition agreement they both agreed to functions. The first six months of the GNU have been full of sound and fury, but it all signifies nothing if we don’t grow an economy out of it. It is also meaningless if it is held hostage by those who want to wreck it.
Ramaphosa needs to be careful, for there are snakes in his ANC who are still leaking his discussions to the Jacob Zuma-led MK Party. He can do nothing to plug these leaks, but there is one area he can control and profit from: the economy. The only way Ramaphosa can win against Zuma is if his promised reforms of state institutions and the economy happen. Nothing is as alluring as success, and right now Ramaphosa remains the man he was in 2018: full of promises and with nothing to show for it. Act, Cyril, or we all end up in Zuma’s hands again.
The international front will be dominated by Trump. None of us is immune. On January 20 he will “shock and awe” the US and the world with a plethora of announcements, edicts and plans for his country. The 45th and soon-to-be 47th president of the US will likely dominate headlines for the entire year as his “tariff bazooka” and other policies reach out across the globe and upend age-old conventions. Then, of course, there will be the responses to him, the tilts in power, the uncertainty and the clashes.
Enjoy the festive season. Another tough year of uncertainty and rupture lies ahead.
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